sai che mi sono fatto un idea completamente diversa della "filosofia " del polarizzato??
il polarizzato sembra di capire che voglia in primis dedicarsi strutturalmente al volume, l'aerobico e pot. lipidica. il che non e' facile perche' mandare in esaurimento le fibre lente per generare uno stimolo che porti ad aumentarne l'efficienza , non e' facile . richiede molto volume , sacrificio e forse anche una certa attenzione a non coinvolgere fibre glicolitiche , quelle da 2Mm in su che sarebbero loro ad esaurisi prima delle lente o che alla lunga limiterebbero il volume necessario
poi dopo dedica sessioni specifiche HIIT normalmente 1su 5 (o 80/20%) perche' sono essenziali.
ma il principio e' , al contrario di tutte le altre metodiche , di guardare la luna (aerobico) e non il dito (l'anaerobico)
forse mi sono fatto un idea sbagliata , ma allo stato attuale , questa e' la mia impressione
Z1 non entra in gioco se non come fase passiva di recupero. e la sessioni facili per permettere una migliore sessione hard , come descrivi , a mio avviso non sono lo scopo del polarizzato.
Ho trovato questa descrizione/riassunto del polarizzato, la parte fondamentale é "spingere il miglioramtno da sotto e non tirarlo da sopra", tradotto in soldoni, é inutile cercare di aumentare le prestazioni ad alta intensità se non si hanno grandi basi aerobiche.
Ecco, questo é l'errore fondamentale che credo venga commesso, mi inserisco sicuramente in questa categoria, quindi per questo inverno cercherò di polarizzare il più possibile e di non stancarmi troppo, tanto riesco comunque ad arrivare al solito livello da pippa in estate.
I have read quite a bit and listened to hours of podcasts (this podcast, fascat, trainerroad, etc) on cycling training, and am I (like everyone one else, I guess!) trying to figure out the best and most sustainable way to ride/train to enjoy myself and get faster. So, just for kicks, this morning over coffee, I gave myself a writing assignment: See if you can articulate the sweet spot vs. polarized “debate” in an accurate way. But how do I grade my short essay? I can’t! That’s your job, dear friends. I know this is cursory and probably off-the-mark in technical aspects here and there. Maybe it gets most of it right, but maybe not. I would love to get an assessment of how well I understand this, though, so anyone who wants to be my professor and grade this essay (with feedback of course!), please do! Thanks a bunch, John
Sweet Sport vs. Polarized Approaches for Enthusiast-Level Cyclists
My rookie/amateur summary: You are an amateur/enthusiast level endurance cyclist, aiming to improve your aerobic fitness so that those gran fondos and
gravel “races” are faster (and more fun), and (of course) so that you can continue to improve on your favorite local Strava segments and climb the ladder in those public rankings. So, no, you don’t race crits or cyclocross, you’re not “Cat” anything ranked, but – yes – you are damned well determined to see if you can become a faster cyclist. I think this is a fair description of a lot of cyclists out there. You have listened to enough podcasts and
red enough forums to know two things: (1) structured training is the way to go to most efficiently raise your fitness/FTP; (2) there is lively debate over whether a polarized or more of a sweet-spot/threshold method would work best.
Your FTP is, say, 275. You have a power meter and you’ve ridden enough long (i.e., greater than 2 hour) rides to know that it is very difficult (and increasingly difficult the longer the rides are!) to average much over about 80% of FTP for the ride (which would be 220 watts average power for this rider this case). When you come back from those long rides and look at your power file, you see that you tend to spend a whole lot of
time in a range between a little above average wattage and just above threshold, say between 240 and 290 or so watts. Intuitively, it feels like the best way to get faster for these (long, steady) rides would be to increase the amount of time you can spend above your current average power. Stated another way, get the fitness to ride with more power by incrementally riding longer with more power. And so, we arrive at the promise of sweet spot training plans, where you spend long intervals pushing ~90% or so of your FTP, in the hopes of gaining the ability to increase the amount of time you can ride in this zone over the course of a long ride. It certainly makes sense that this would work. (And, of course, improvements do come with this method. The question is: Can you get even better improvements with a polarized approach?) As such, sweet spot training falls into the “you’re good at what you do” approaches. You want to be able to ride longer at 250 watts? Ride more and longer around 250 watts! So, with sweet spot, what you are really trying to do is raise your FTP, under the assumption that your average power on long rides will be lifted with it. (e.g., If I can now ride for 3 hours at 220 watts, which is 80% of my FTP and I raise my FTP to 300, maybe I can then ride at 240 watts for 3 hours. Boom.)
The polarized advocate then chimes in and says, wait a minute, that may not be the best way to raise that endurance race-pace. A problem with the sweet spot approach is that (for the FTP 275 cyclist) training at 220 watts and 250 watts produce almost identical adaptations, i.e., aerobic improvements. Yet, the 220-watt training ride does so without producing nearly as much stress on the body, and is hence much easier and quicker to recover from. This allows for higher quality work on subsequent days (including high quality work on high-intensity interval days and on long-ride days), higher quality recovery, and more lasting adaptations. If you have the time (no small qualifier, and how much time is very much in debate) to put in meaningful truly endurance-level work (Z1 in the 3-zone model, or Z2 in the 5 zone), i.e., polarize your training, you can efficiently (and less painfully) raise that endurance floor from below (rather than the “lifting it from above” method that is sweet spot training). It may seem counterintuitive to think that the best way to get from 220W to 240W for a target average power for a very long ride is to ride more at 200-220W, rather than riding more and longer at 240 or 250 in the hopes of “getting better at what you do.” (Or, perhaps, spending most of your time riding as hard as you can currently ride for long periods [polarized] is likely a more efficient strategy than riding just a bit harder than that [sweet spot].) With polarized training, you may be able to build a bigger and more durable base while at the same time feeling less worn down by your training. As such, an added bonus for many cyclists to a polarized approach may be longer-term sustainability of training, and hence larger and most lasting gains).
